A petition re the validity of gay marriage in Taiwan has overtaken the legislative process. In a ruling this afternoon, the Court states that gay marriage IS covered under the existing Constitution. According to my Taiwan friends who just called, parliament must proceed with legislation that is effective not later than two years time. Great news!

Let's recall the barbarity of what is going in in Aceh. The scene was mediaeval with those doing the caning fully covered apart from eye slits (where they women?) and a large crowd all but baying for blood. These young men were making love in the privacy of an apartment when a gang entered with cameras. Sharia law requires several witnesses before conviction for being gay and so the intrusion was clearly premeditated and intended to humiliate and exact punishment. Barbaric!

In the thread "Where Did Boys Not Wear Swimming Trunks in 1952?" I wrote this yesterday -

fountainhall wrote:We know that the primary objective of colonialism was trade and profit. We know too that following in a heartbeat were the missionaries determined to root out all local customs and convert the “natives” to Christ - “their” idea of Christ’s teaching!

In Taiwan, Christians make up less than 4% of the population. But they carry far more weight in an island where Chiang Kai Shek and his wife were avid Christians.

This tiny minority is now trying once again to change last year's decision of the Constitutional Court which ruled that the government must enact a law to permit gay marriage by the middle of 2019. Now the island's Central Election Commission has bowed to pressure and passed proposals to permit three island-wide referenda on same-sex marriage. Although this issue has partly been thrown back for public debate, any negative majority would not yet overrule the Constitutional Court decision. What it does is illustrate how the government - led by a President who ran on a same-sex marriage platform - has dithered and made no progress since the gay marriage decision. Now it is trying to find some way of having the population as a whole affect the decision which they are constitutionally bound to enact.

As with all referenda, the key is in the wording and how the public perceive the exact meaning of the wording.

According to Storm Media, the first proposed referendum question is “do you agree to protect the rights of same-sex couples to initiate a long-time relationship to live together based on the laws other than Taiwan’s Civil Code?” The proposed first question was followed by: “Do you agree that elementary and junior high schools should not initiate “gay and lesbian education” as regulated in the Enforcement Rules for the Gender Equality Education Act?” and “Do you agree that the Civil Code should only allow opposite-sex marriage?”

Influential lawyer Lu Chiu-yuan (呂秋遠) on Tuesday questioned the government for tardy progress over the amendment of the Civil Code to address last year's ruling by the constitutional court in favor of same-sex marriage. Lu continued to say that if the government could have put one tenth of the efforts it put into the labor law amendment into the other issue, same-sex marriage would have been legalized today.

The tiny 4% which persuaded the powers-that-be that these referenda be adopted is led by J. Michael Cole, the Editor in Chief of Taiwan Sentinel, a Christian KMT members-backed organization. So he's not even a Taiwanese!

Haha! I suspect though that you are only half correct. Chiang himself was a Buddhist as were his first wife and son. When Sun Yat-sen died, Chiang decided he would marry his widow, Soong Ching-ling, thereby giving himself greater legitimacy as the ruler of China. Unfortunately for him, she refused and went on to remain in China as a potent symbol of Mao's revolution. So wily Chiang married her younger sister instead, Soong Mei-ling. The highly influential and rich Soong family were devout Christians. So Mei-ling's father insisted he convert to Christianity before he would permit the marriage. No doubt Chiang made the decision based on power and influence rather than faith.

Mei-ling herself went on to become one of the most powerful women in the world, loved by Americans and loathed by most Chinese. But she remained a Christian until her death in New York at the age of 105.